Rebel leader Eden Pastora talks of a ceasefire

Press, 9 August 1985, Page 17

Rebel leader Eden Pastora talks of a ceasefire

From

COLIN SMITH,

at San Juan

River, Nicaragua

Eden Pastora, the Nicaraguan rebel leader, claims that his Contra forces are broke, hungry, and sick, and that he is considering a ceasefire and talks with the Cubanbacked junta in Managua. None of the “humanitarian aid” the United States Congress has voted to the Contras has yet come to him and he has failed to raise funds hiring a recent visit to Washington. “That was my last hope,” he says. For a while Pastora was probably the best known Nicaraguan in the world with the possible exception of Bianca Jagger. He was the dashing Commander Zero, the man with what Graham Greene called the “handsome actor's face,” the most daring guerrilla leader of the Sandinista revolution. In 1978, he commanded a brilliant coup de theatre when he held hostage dictator Anastasio Somoza’s stooge Parliament in the National Palace until Somoza agreed to free some jailed Sandinistas and they were all flown outiof the country together.

When Somoza was overthrown in July, 1979, he was made Deputy Defence Minister in charge of the country’s militia. Soon he became disillusioned with his old comrades whom he accused of selling out the revolution to the Cubans and the Russians. By the autumn of 1983 he was back in the jungle again, leading a guerrilla band he calls the Revolutionary Democratic Alliance for which the Spanish acronym is A.R.D.E. The Nicaraguan leadership say that Pastora is a gloryhunter unable to settle to the serious business of politics. He says they are all homosexuals and jealous of his (heterosexual) lovelife. He claims to have 22 sons, “like David or Solomon.”

He has at times compared himself with Che Guevara, Simon Bolivar, Moses, and Jesus Christ. “Always remembering the distance between us,” he adds, humbly.

For a few months A.R.D.E., based along the San Juan River on Nicaragua’s southern frontier with Costa Rica, received some support

from the C.I.A. This was withdrawn in February, 1984, because he refused to enter an alliance with the Honduran-based Nicaraguan Democratic Front (F.D.N.) on the ground that it included too many of Somoza’s old National Guard.

In May last year, Pastora escaped an assassination attempt when a bomb disguised as a tape recorder exploded when he was giving a press conference at his headquarters. Three reporters died of their wounds while Pastora’s bodyguards bustled their dazed and hurt leader away in a helicopter. He is still uncertain who did it. “Either the extreme Left or extreme Right,” he says. Pastora’s headquarters is a few wooden huts just inside Nicaraguan territory at a place called Trinidad where the Costa Rican river Sarapiqui flows into the broad sweep of the Rio San Juan.

The Nicaraguan Government is well aware of its location. Quite near the radio shack is a large crater, a memento of the Sandinista air force’s lyist visit. In

recent weeks A.R.D.E., which claims to have about 5000 men under arms, has been forced back in an easterly direction along the San Juan.

It is a remote area. To get to Zero from the Costa Rican side involves a two-hour sail from Puetro Viejo where the road runs out in a little aluminium-hulled open boat powered by an outboard. Despite Costa Rica’s pretensions not to have an army, the Civil Guard at the frontier post on the bank opposite the rebels’ camp look like most of the world’s infantrymen with their olive-green uniforms and assault rifles. When we arrived the officer in charge was supervising the departure to a refugee camp upstream of some Nicaraguans who had abandoned Zero. There were 27 of them. None looked older than 30 and two were wounded. One had shrapnel in the back and he/jvas

carried on to the boat on a stretcher by Civil Guards. They were as gentle as they could be with him but when they put him down he started up an old man’s cough. The other man had a leg wound and limped down to the boat supported by two others. The Nicaraguans were a ragged bunch in torn trousers and scraps of uniform. One man wore a studded football boot with three yellow stripes on his left foot and on the other a brown shoe. The Korean-made boots the Americans originally gave to the guerrillas fell apart after about a month in the jungle, and foot fungus is a major problem in A.R.D.E. They were not deserters. They had been allowed to leave after giving up their weapons because there was not enough food or ammunition to go round. Some claimed they had been fighting for

almost three years. They said they would fight against the Communists with any other group providing it had ammunition and money. The differences between the various resistance organisations were, they explained, between the leaders and not the men. Across the river there is a sign which says, “Welcome to free Nicaragua,” and a sentry with an old M-14 rifle. Pastora, as befits a commander, was in freshly-pressed fatigues with the case for his sunglasses sitched to his shoulder webbing and a new-looking sub-machine-gun version of the M-16 across his back. His boots were American jungle issue. He broke off a meeting with some of his political aides, three men in civilian clothes, and led us in a tactical retreat from a marauding column of ants to talk squatting by a network of trenches. Where were the nearest Sandinistsas?

“Here. I am a Sandinista. They , are the Communists. These seman- • tic distinctions are important. They

call us ‘lmperialists’ and ‘Contras.’ They try to give us the most negative names they can but it does not alter the truth. We are the Sandinistas; they are the Communists.”

We spoke for about an hour during which time he made some oddly contradictory statements. Their situation, he said, was extremely difficult but not desperate, because the idea of death was not desperate for them. A.R.D.E. will either be defeated or will declare a cease-fire. Then again, A.R.D.E. can lose the battle of the Rio San Juan but cannot lose the war.

Yet he was also offering an unconditional cease-fire. “How can you fight when you are barefooted and ill?” He blames the C.I.A. for most of his troubles. They are “blockading” him. They are only interested in puppets. He is not anti-Marxist. He is anti-Marxist-Leninism. He is anti-Communist. He is a democrat who fights all dictatorships including the dictatorship of the proletariat because he supports the demo-

cracy of the proletariat. It seemed obvious during our talks that what Pastora really wanted to do was to send a message to Washington where he is not without support among Republican senators. His message is simply either pay up or lose the main component of your southern front against the Nicaraguans. He has made similar threats before but this time it is more credible because A.R.D.E. has lost ground and really is in a bad way. As we left, a worried looking guerrilla with a red bandana tied around his forehead arrived by boat from the nearest fighting, which was about 12 miles away, bearing obviously dismal tidings. Pastora responded with a quick lesson in tactics, miming a man firing short bursts and then falling back. The guerrilla looked disappointed. One had the feeling that he had been hoping to go back with something a bit weightier than his commander’s advice.

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